Spanish 223: Major Poets of the Golden Age

An overview of poetry and poetics that emphasize issues of visualization. Our focus will be on poetry from the early modern period, but we will cover most of the poetry on the Peninsular section of the General Examination reading list. Poets and related topics will include Santillana (oral vs. written performance, the origins of the canon, iconicity); Garcilaso de la Vega (imitation of Italian models, courtiership, sprezzatura), Fray Luis de Leon and San Juan de la Cruz (questions of language and culture, the centrality of metaphor); the anonymous collection of erotic poetry edited by Pierre Alzieu et al. (questions of gender and power); Herrera (organization of poem-books, visualization and clarity as metaphors); and Góngora, and Quevedo (the rise of the Baroque). We will also read theorists who have emphasized questions of visualization, with a special focus on Ezra Pound. Each week we will make some time to discuss some issues in poetic theory and the poems on the reading list; students can choose to write either a term paper or a four short essays.

This course fulfills an elective requirement for the DE in REMS.